Harper, paperback, 605 pp., $6.99.
Will Rabjohns, the protagonist of Clive Barker’s latest and best novel, is a controversial photographer of endangered and dying species. “For most of his adult life he’d made photographs of the untamed world, reporting to the human tribe the tragedies that occurred in contested territories. They were seldom human tragedies. It was the populace of the other world that withered and perished daily. And as he witnessed the steady erosion of the wilderness, the hunger in him grew to leap the fences and be part of it, before it was gone.”
That hunger is born of a hollow ambition that has driven Will since his youth: “He was not…designed for happiness. It was too much like contentment, and contentment was too much like sleep.” In the novel’s opening act, it brings him to Hudson Bay, where images of polar bears wallowing in garbage will provide a mournful conclusion to what may be his final book of photographs. In his forty-first year of life, he is lost to melancholy, the onset of middle age and a dire sense of things winding down. In a world that seems defined by death, his success seems meaningless, and the purpose of his photographs, and of his life, is unclear. “The less alive you were, the better chance you had at living. There was probably a lesson in that somewhere, though it was a bitter one.”
When a bear is wounded, a misguided sense of responsibility leads Will into its violent embrace. This is death, he thinks: “This is what you’ve photographed so many times. The dolphin drowning in the net, pitifully quiescent; the monkey twitching among its dead fellows, looking at him with a gaze Will could not stand to meet, except through his camera. They were all the same in this moment, he and the monkey, he and the bear. All ephemeral things, running out of time.”
It is not death, but epiphany. Ravaged and comatose, Will’s body heals while his mind returns to the thirteenth year of his youth in England. The second son of Eleanor and Hugo Rabjohns—a philosopher and domestic tyrant whose later scholarship echoes Julia Kristeva—Will grew up in the shadow of his brother, Nathaniel (who, like Barker’s own brother, Roy, seemed more truly his father’s son); but when Nathaniel died in an accident, Eleanor withdrew into polite madness and Hugo moved the family from Manchester to the Yorkshire village of Burnt Yarley.
There, in a ruined maze known as the Courthouse—a madman’s throne of judgment for those who would abuse animals—Will meets the man and woman whom he will learn to love and hate more strongly than his parents: “Jacob Steep, with his soot-and-gold eyes and black beard and pale poet’s hands” and glorious Rosa McGee, “who had the gold of Steep’s eyes in her hair and the black of his beard in her gaze, but who was as fleshy and passionate as he was sweatless and unmoved.”
This curious, unearthly pair join with Will in the most crucial of the triadic structures through which his life has been defined: Will and his parents, Will and his childhood friends, Will and his photographic team, Will and his lovers—a series of incomplete men and women united and transformed by the enigma that is his life. Steep is the “Killer of Last Things,” stalking the planet with knife in hand to put an end to each dying species. Once he had believed that, by recording each act of extinction in a journal, he could earn God’s forgiveness; but now, like the elder Will, whose photographs no longer seem sufficient, Steep doubts the purpose of his life; soon he argues that, without purpose, there is no God—and no bounds to violence: “We’re alone, with the power to do whatever we want.” His consort, Mrs. McGee, mingles desires both carnal and fatal, played out through her “rosaries”—strange ropes that cavort like viperous extensions of her flesh. Their odd coupling has spanned three centuries, and Rosa’s womb has carried eighty-seven children, all of whom died at birth.
Steep’s ennui is leavened by the young and inquisitive Will, who offers the prospect of a new companion. Steep offers his apt pupil a simple but lasting lesson: “Living and dying we feed the fire.” His secret knowledge of the darkness, and the need to hold it at bay, seems profound and seductive: “For an instant…Will saw himself at Jacob’s side, walking in a city street, and Steep was shining out of every pore, and people were weeping with gratitude that he came to light their darkness.”
Steep’s tutelage is swift and certain: Will learns to feed the fire—to kill—by casting a moth into a flame. When, wielding Steep’s thirsty blade, he butchers two birds, Steep asks him to imagine that they were the last of their species: “This will not come again…Nor this, nor this…” Such an act, Will realizes, could change the world.
When Will and Steep touch, the spilled blood summons something more, a vision of Steep’s past. In 1730, elsewhere in the bucolic English countryside, Steep was sent to confront the visionary artist Thomas Simeon, whose talents had succumbed first to debauchery and then to the patronage of a mysterious mystic and satyric sermonizer named Gerard Rukenau. Simeon had been brought to Rukenau’s retreat in the Hebrides to chronicle, in paintings, the construction of an arcane cathedral known as the Domus Mundi (literally, the House of the World). When Simeon left, Steep was dispatched to bring him home; but the painter committed suicide, poisoning himself with his pigments, rather than return to Rukenau. Before his death, he offered Steep the petal of a flower, and the meaning of the true sacrament:
I have the Holy of Holies here, the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself, right here on the tip of my little finger.…If I could paint this perfection…put it on a sheet of paper so that it showed its true glory, every painting in every chapel in Rome, every illumination of every Book of Hours, every picture I ever made for every one of Rukenau’s damned invocations would be…superfluous.
Steep blamed Rukenau for the painter’s death and rejected his teachings: “You gave him your genius; he paid you in lunacy. That makes him a thief, at very least. I won’t serve him after this. And I will never forgive him.” The rage of his apostasy translated into the zealous assault upon creation that became his life’s work: “If the world were a simpler place, we would not be lost in it.…We wouldn’t be greedy for novelty. We wouldn’t always want something new, always something new! We’d live the way Thomas wanted to live, in awe of the mysteries of a petal.” His passion for simplicity—and, in time, for absence—finds Steep, like the misguided forces of morality in Weaveworld and Imajica, seeking to cleanse the world: the building of a New Eden without error or imperfection—the ideal place to find God, to understand the purpose of his existence.
Steep’s memories, like his lessons, taint Will, transforming a lost child into a lost man who desperately chronicles the last of things: “He shaped you, Will. He sowed the hopes and the disappointments, he sowed the guilt and the yearning.” When, as an adult, Will looks upon one of Simeon’s paintings, he recognizes the horrifying relationship to his own photographs: “They were the before and after scenes, bookends to the holocaust text that lay between. And the author of that text? Steep, of course. Simeon had painted the moment before Steep appeared: all life in terror at Steep’s imminence. Will had caught the moment after: all life in extremis, the fertile acre become a field of desolation.”
When Will awakens from the coma, very little has changed since his mauling by the bear—or since his youth. “They were in a world of endings, or early and unexpected goodbyes, not so unlike the time from which he’d wakened.” He is living in the midst of death—of animals, to be sure, but also of friends, and especially his best friend and former lover Patrick, now dying of AIDS.
The past, once remembered, pursues Will with feral intensity. Lord Fox, an avatar of his guilt, haunts Will, forcing him to look upon the ravaged world with the unfettered eyes of his childhood: “God wants you to see,” Lord Fox tells him. “Don’t ask me why. That’s between you and God. I’m just the go-between.” The creature confronts Will with a conundrum, proposing that “the passing of things, of days and beasts and men he’d loved, was just a cruel illusion and memory, a clue to its unmasking.” This revelation only amplifies Will’s painful knowledge that he, like Steep, is a pretender: pretending to find purpose in life,
